Ba Jin has extended his influence well beyond the world of literature. His novel, Family, has become a required or selective reading in university courses throughout the world on the history of China and East Asia.
"I use Ba Jin's novel Family in my history courses because it vividly portrays the deep transformation in Chinese thinking during the May Fourth period," John Flower, an instructor with the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, said in his e-mail to China Daily.
"The novel is particularly good for giving a glimpse of the internal struggles young people faced as they tried to understand and live by the new ideals of individualism, personal liberation, social equality, and patriotic nationalism introduced by publications of the New Culture Movement."
He said the novel brings to life that important period of modern Chinese history. "My American students respond to it extremely well," he said.
Flower said he has chosen Family also because Ba Jin's personal experiences mirror "the struggle of Chinese intellectuals over a long period of tumultuous history."
"Ba Jin's long and influential life epitomizes the Chinese intellectual tradition of serving as the 'conscience of society,'" Flower said.
"Perhaps his greatest legacy lies in his lifelong struggle to liberate both the individual and the nation of China. Throughout his long life, Ba Jin continued to struggle for truth, and for the ideal of the free individual," Flower said. "His legacy for world literature will be the universal theme of the personal struggle to make an existential commitment to new values.
Flower added that he believes Ba Jin's work will long be admired and studied by those eager to acquire an in-depth understanding of the history of modern China, and by those who want to reflect on their own inner struggles.
Flower first read Family in the late 1980s. He said he was impressed by how effectively the characters conveyed the broader themes of the May Fourth Movement in very personal terms.
"Even more impressive to me, however, was the subtlety Ba Jin wrote into those characters; they are complex, ambivalent, conflicted and therefore convincing to readers everywhere," he said.
Indeed, a search on Ba Jin at www.amazon.com came up with his novel Family in English, and quite a few readers' reviews.
"I was in a small bookstore one day many years ago and just happened to come across Ba Jin's Family. I started to read a few pages and became so interested in it that I had to buy it," Judy Lind from the United States wrote in her e-mail to China Daily.
"It is one of my favorite books," said Lind, who has written some 350 pieces of book reviews on www.amazon.com.
She said she had no idea Ba Jin was still alive all these years. "Ba Jin's Family is an excellent, absorbing account of one family in early 20th century China," she wrote in her review on the Amazon website. "Through the conflicts between the generations, we see the larger conflicts about to engulf the entire country.
"The family is the Kao (Gao) clan, five generations living in one complex headed by the Venerable Master Kao, the ultimate autocrat, monarch of all he surveys within his walls, unwilling and unable to admit that his country and his family are changing before his eyes. Family is a totally absorbing account of a family in crisis; on the one hand, we sympathize with the bind Juexin (Chueh-Hsin) is caught up in as the oldest son, able to please neither his elders who demand his total compliance with the family traditions nor his younger brothers who need his assistance in their efforts to break free of the confines of those traditions, and on the other hand we empathize with the youngsters' efforts to live their own lives and realize their own destinies."
Another reviewer with the online moniker of DReese wrote: "I had to read this book for a modern Chinese history class in college and found it very enjoyable. It focuses on a time in time that many of us in the West do not really think much about when the Chinese were wrestling with entering the modern world...
"The story, of the generational conflicts that exist as traditional family roles are stretched by modernization, is also relevant in today's world," DReese wrote.
(China Daily October 19, 2005)
